Tracking Impact: Romanian Academic Society to Address Problems Identified by Global Integrity

Big news! Today, we received word that the Romanian Academic Society (SAR) earned a grant to implement its Global Integrity Impact Challenge project proposal. With this new funding, SAR will conduct a year-long assessment on the effectiveness of transparency and accountability mechanisms in the Romania’s energy procurement process — a weakness noted in the Global…

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Accidental Censorship: How Policy, Markets and Technology Inadvertently Silence Political Speech

Our first post in an ongoing series exploring the transformation of journalism and what that means for democracy. Journalist and media critic Anne Elizabeth Moore describes the forces that are inadvertently silencing political speech in the United States. Sometimes, accidental policy can do a lot of damage. In the spring of 2006, Time-Warner, the largest…

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Drug Money in Mexican Elections? Political Financing Rules Might Help.

The pervasive influence of drug cartels in Mexico is, by now, a fixture in the media and public imagination. Since the beginning of Felipe Calderón’s tenure as President of Mexico, his administration has taken a more aggressive stance against the Mexican drug cartels. During Calderón’s presidency there has been increased violence especially in the cities…

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The Discreet Charm of Flexians: Reviewing Janine Wedel’s Shadow Elite

Contrary to what its name may imply, “flexians” — the subject of the anthropologist and public policy scholar Janine Wedel’s stimulating new book Shadow Elite— are not alien beings from an episode of Star Trek. Rather, they are a relatively new, distinctly terrestrial constellation of actors who are remolding the landscape of global governance. Emblematic…

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